Twitter's Vice-President of Product Michael Sippey wrote on his blog: "Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (six seconds or less) inspires creativity."

Twitter has acquired New York start-up Vine Labs, which is behind the technology, it said. It is unrelated to Microsoft's former Twitter-like urgent alerts notification service by the same name. After three years of development, Microsoft Vine launched in 2009 as a limited beta, but the service was discontinued the following year.

Dom Hofmann, the co-founder and general manager of Twitter's Vine, wrote on the company's website: "Like Twitter, we want to make it easier for people to come together to share and discover what's happening in the world."

"We also believe constraint inspires creativity, whether it's through a 140-character tweet or a six-second video."

He added: "Posts on Vine are about abbreviation--the shortened form of something larger.

"They're little windows into the people, settings, ideas, and objects that make up your life. They're quirky, and we think that's part of what makes them so special."

The launch of the new service has not been without issues. Users discovered that when using Vine, sharing their tweets would sometimes result in it being posted to other users' accounts. PopTip founder Kelsey Falter was one user that found her company's Twitter account was used to post someone else's post from the Vine app.